As rise-and-fall stories go, Thornburg Mortgage's is neither the biggest nor the most shocking. But it is worth studying because Harold Garrett Thornburg Jr. is more than a man of his time. He is a man who made his time.

So how did it come to this?

Are you as sick of the recession as we are? Are you ready to have some fun? So are we. So, it turns out, are a lot of folks.

That’s why this week we asked numerous businesses and people around town to give our readers a break. The following pages are filled with people and places giving away free and seriously discounted items—from free pizza toppings to beer to books and beyond.

What’s the catch?

This project began a year and a half ago with the United World College’s Beyond Borders club, a dozen or so students, from places such as Zimbabwe, Poland, Iraq and Hong Kong, who all have a common interest in human rights. Students interviewed each other—Costa Ricans spoke to Tanzanians, Americans surveyed Cambodians—and then shared their findings. The individual words were written and rewritten into a single voice to reflect a global youth vision of the melting pot of challenges and hopes for the future.

Each year, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center takes stock of racist groups in the United States by publishing a “year in hate” report. In 2008, despite—or maybe in part because of—the racial breakthrough of Barack Obama’s election as president, the number of hate groups rose—by 54 percent, according to the center.

This week, SFR presents SPLC’s Intelligence Report on these groups, as well as an editorial from Intelligence Report Editor Mark Potok.

The state of New Mexico paid for cloud seeding beginning in the 1990s, but the money dried up after 2005, and subsequent funding bills failed to take root. Now the New Mexico Legislature is considering a bill to pay for cloud seeding in the southeastern corner of the state. The work would fall to Gary Walker’s organization, SOAR, short for Seeding Operations and Atmospheric Research.

Signs of ancient life are everywhere in New Mexico. Consider the Galisteo Basin, just outside the city of Santa Fe, where hundreds of archaeological sites blanket the ground. These range from drawings etched hundreds of years ago onto boulders and scatters of flaked stone—where someone sat and chipped a tool, leaving behind bits and pieces of rock—to entire villages and sacred ceremonial structures.

But not everyone believes the State Land Office is properly overseeing the thousands of archaeological resources on state lands. As a result, archaeologists say, history is being lost.

In May 1984, John Allen was ready to launch plans for the project that had become his life’s work. Biosphere 2 had been developing in his brain since the early 1960s—at least philosophically. What Allen wanted to design was an experimental structure that put to use the total systems approach to society, ecology and his own life.

Good government organizations use “sunlight” as the metaphor to describe laws and methods of opening the political process to the public in order to improve its influence and participation. By most measures, New Mexico’s lawmaking process is perpetually overcast:

Crucial meetings between Senate and House members are closed to the public; invitation-only receptions for legislators run at breakfast, lunch and dinnertime almost every day of the session. New Mexico doesn’t limit campaign contributions and, as a result, corporations, lobbyists and the independently wealthy are often able to buy greater access to their lawmakers than the average constituent.

This A-to-Z guide to pay-to-play in New Mexico is not meant to be complete. Nor does this guide offer anything close to proof of misconduct. Use it as a catalogue of coincidences—coincidences that, if the Obama era is to be a cleaner one, at least demand a second look.

The top non-fiction stories: The Wild West Comes of Age by Barbara Tyner, Horizontal Displacement by Tom Ireland and Desert Blood by Pasquala Enos.